16 ms·

Cheese from the same proteins as milk, but from genetically modified yeast

65 points by asciimo 12y ago

asciimo 12y ago
Why so at cow's milk? "They also hope to engineer cheese based on the milk of the narwhal, the most outlandish mammal they could imagine."
tracker1 12y ago
So, the real question is if the target audience is against using actual cow's milk, don't they have a heavy correlation to the anti-gmo crowd?
- moron4hire 12y ago
  They are also not the most rational crowd.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    True enough.. I just mean it seems to me their target market is self-destroying based on how the stuff is made. That said, I think it's hard enough to get cheese that is simply cheese, let alone crafted/aged cheeses that I'll keep with cow/goat based cheeses for the foreseeable future.
  - mesh 12y ago
    That is a pretty broad generalization.
- njohnson41 12y ago
  Correlation, sure. But even as a non-vegetarian, I can understand the argument for not raising animals directly or indirectly for food, due to inefficiency. Vegans who believe that but don't really care about food being "natural" would still want this stuff; not all vegans are motivated to be vegan by the same things.
  - jqm 12y ago
    Indeed. Ideological eaters are and probably always will be a minority. Economics based eaters on the other hand.....
- chc 12y ago
  I would expect there's a stronger-than-average correlation there — mainly because they have the common prerequisite of caring about what you eat — but my hunch is that most vegans wouldn't object to this. I can personally say I'd buy it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  There are plenty of anti-GMO vegans. But I'm sure there are plenty of vegans who'd be fine with it. After all, there is a scientific case for veganism too.
  - chc 12y ago
    Even the ethical case for veganism doesn't have much to say about GMO. The idea that hurting animals is wrong doesn't in any way entail that creating genetically engineered plants or microorganisms is wrong.
    - tracker1 12y ago
      I am speaking from personal experience, but most of my vegan friends are also vocally anti-gmo... it just seemed to me that man vegans are also anti-gmo so it might be a self-defeating effort to target a subset of a subset market.
- schoen 12y ago
  I'm a vegan who's motivated by opposition to animal agriculture, so I enthusiastically support research like this (and think it's the most promising path I've heard of to a vegan human future). I went to a vegan advocacy organization event a few months ago where this topic came up, and other attendees shared my enthusiasm for this kind of research, but the diversity of views and motivations in the vegan community makes me wary of claiming that that means this is mainstream. To answer your correlation question, probably yes -- but vegans' attitudes toward "tampering with nature" vary widely from the view that it's the worst possible thing humanity can do, on through to the view that it's the best possible thing humanity can do (e.g., David Pearce), with a broad spectrum in between. (I don't have an ideal example of the former group in mind, but I could mention Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, who advocates deep ecology and opposes GMOs.) I think we will see sharper divisions between environmentalist vegans (especially advocates of deep ecology) and animal rights/animal welfare vegans over time. I don't know how the population breaks down in the west today, or how many people have even had to think about it that much.
  - rboyd 12y ago
    Your last sentence is pretty interesting to me. After months of prodding from my girlfriend to go vegan, the book 'Abundance' and the chapter on the water inefficiency of factory farming is what finally turned me. It was reasonably easy for me to justify carnivorism as naturally occurring, harder to justify water waste with so many humans going thirsty. Without even starting down the emissions road. That said, looking at it now (and especially once synthetic meats come online, out of cost efficiency if nothing else), I think our children might look back on the practice of animal slaughter as being pretty horrifically barbaric.
    - hollerith 12y ago
      >with so many humans going thirsty Where are there humans going thirsty? Honest question.
      - Swizec 12y ago
        In places where they don't have water purification plants. Also in places that are becoming uninhabitable to humans. Think expanding deserts and such.
DiabloD3 12y ago
I'm anti-GMO, anti-dairy, pro-cheese, and pro-beef (so Im not in the vegan crowd at all)... yet I'd at least try this especially if it produced high quality cheeses on par with the best unpasteurized cheeses I've had. Why am I anti-diary? The pasteurization process produces denatured proteins (linked to cancer), contains hormones that are not biologically inert for humans (we are not baby cows), and contain huge amounts of lactose (a sugar that some people are allergic to, and is not a particularly good thing to have in our diets). The production of most hard cheeses and some soft cheeses tends to remove a lot of the hormone and lactose content, as well as some of the denatured proteins. Cheese does not require pasteurized milk, nor does it benefit from it in any way, as cheese was the first viable method for long term storage of milk.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Lactose intolerance is not an allergy. (I'm not sure that is what you mean or not though, and some people do indeed have milk allergies.)
  - Zancarius 12y ago
    It could go both ways. I can't speak for the OP, but I can say that I've found it's sometimes easier to explain sensitivities as allergies to people who don't understand the differences. So, giving that poster the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume they either don't know the difference themselves, or they DO know but don't want to split hairs on the matter in case someone doesn't know. As a personal anecdote along these lines and since discovering my own sensitivities to canola (and rapeseed oils in general), I've learned that simply calling it a "sensitivity" doesn't always convey the need to avoid certain ingredients. So, sometimes I tell people instead to "think of it as a food allergy," which they usually understand. I think that at least part of the problem is that, to a layperson, sensitivity doesn't sound as urgent or at least is suggestive of "optional avoidance." For some people, chemical sensitivities are anything but optional avoidance...
    - Dylan16807 12y ago
      Does it even qualify as a sensitivity? The problem is that the body ignores the lactose.
Houshalter 12y ago
A similar idea in the works is using bacteria to produce sugar and other nutrients. One company claims they can make more than 30 times as much sugar per acre as regular agriculture. Some discussion and links on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future_of_food_and_why_cities_wont_need_much/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future...
jqm 12y ago
The article mentions proteins can be produced by yeast, but an additional fat (such as palm oil) will need to be added. Yeasts don't produce fats? Can something else be modified to produce fats identical to milk fat? A plant maybe?
- george88b 12y ago
  E. coli can be genetically modified to produce fats. Yeast can too. The fat content is just more varied requiring many different yeast clones to be developed for production.
poulsbohemian 12y ago
Amateur cheesemaker here - coincidentally the research side of commercial cheesemaking is already doing very similar things because separating milk into its constituent components is more profitable than actually making cheese. I attended a class about a month ago where the message was that in the future we won't make cheese from milk, but rather we'll start with just those caseins that have been extracted and concentrated. The thinking is that even the water in the milk may have other commercial value apart from just the cheesemaking, or at a minimum can be captured and used in lieu of needing an additional water source. Wish they would have gone a little deeper on the science in the article - they mention chymosin for example, but as far as I know the vast majority of chymosin used in commercial cheese production today is already vegan (at least in the US - Europe not necessarily).
bayesianhorse 12y ago
From the standpoint of animal welfare, I think milk and cheese are some of the least offending products. For about 7000 kilos of milk "only" one cow has to live for a year, and birth one calve. With about a 50% chance of this calve being raised for slaughter. And both cow and calve also yield meat. Compare that to the one chicken per chicken. If you don't want to go vegan, but reduce your animal welfare "footprint", avoid meat from small animals like pigs and poultry.
- danuker 12y ago
  I stand to disagree. While animal "welfare" can be measured in individuals, we also need to consider the impact on the environment. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#Water_resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... it says that the water consumption per quantity of meat is 3-4 times lower for poultry and pork than for beef. The environment supports many more animals that we do not eat, so resource use is more important than headcount in my opinion. You could count the number of flies that died because of industry, but what would that accomplish?
- guygurari 12y ago
  This belief is unfortunately misguided; there is much suffering involved in industrial milk production [1]. It begins with the cow being separated from its calf, usually when it is just newly born. The cow generally responds by searching frantically for its lost calf, repeatedly crying out for it until its throat becomes sore. The cow might also become sick and lose weight due to the separation. It continues with the milking process, which is painful and terrifying for the cows, as evidenced by their response. Milk-producing cows have been bred to maximize milk production, which means they have oversized udders that lead to illness. These are just a few examples of many. Generally speaking, cows in the dairy industry lead a short and exceedingly miserable life. If the goal is to minimize suffering without going vegan, I think that wild-caught fish provide the least offending animal-based food. But wild-caught fish are generally bad from an ecological perspective. [1] See for example http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/ http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/ , http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/ http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/ , and the documentary films Earthlings and Food Inc. A quick google search will reveal many more sources.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  Actually they spend a healthy chunk of the article on that topic.
aurora72 12y ago
What about making a human without human? To those who try to outsmart nature: Would they like to be produced without human?

65 points by asciimo 12y ago

Why so at cow's milk? "They also hope to engineer cheese based on the milk of the narwhal, the most outlandish mammal they could imagine."

tracker1 12y ago

So, the real question is if the target audience is against using actual cow's milk, don't they have a heavy correlation to the anti-gmo crowd?

moron4hire 12y ago
They are also not the most rational crowd.
- tracker1 12y ago
  True enough.. I just mean it seems to me their target market is self-destroying based on how the stuff is made. That said, I think it's hard enough to get cheese that is simply cheese, let alone crafted/aged cheeses that I'll keep with cow/goat based cheeses for the foreseeable future.
- mesh 12y ago
  That is a pretty broad generalization.
njohnson41 12y ago
Correlation, sure. But even as a non-vegetarian, I can understand the argument for not raising animals directly or indirectly for food, due to inefficiency. Vegans who believe that but don't really care about food being "natural" would still want this stuff; not all vegans are motivated to be vegan by the same things.
- jqm 12y ago
  Indeed. Ideological eaters are and probably always will be a minority. Economics based eaters on the other hand.....
chc 12y ago
I would expect there's a stronger-than-average correlation there — mainly because they have the common prerequisite of caring about what you eat — but my hunch is that most vegans wouldn't object to this. I can personally say I'd buy it.
TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
There are plenty of anti-GMO vegans. But I'm sure there are plenty of vegans who'd be fine with it. After all, there is a scientific case for veganism too.
- chc 12y ago
  Even the ethical case for veganism doesn't have much to say about GMO. The idea that hurting animals is wrong doesn't in any way entail that creating genetically engineered plants or microorganisms is wrong.
  - tracker1 12y ago
    I am speaking from personal experience, but most of my vegan friends are also vocally anti-gmo... it just seemed to me that man vegans are also anti-gmo so it might be a self-defeating effort to target a subset of a subset market.
schoen 12y ago
I'm a vegan who's motivated by opposition to animal agriculture, so I enthusiastically support research like this (and think it's the most promising path I've heard of to a vegan human future). I went to a vegan advocacy organization event a few months ago where this topic came up, and other attendees shared my enthusiasm for this kind of research, but the diversity of views and motivations in the vegan community makes me wary of claiming that that means this is mainstream. To answer your correlation question, probably yes -- but vegans' attitudes toward "tampering with nature" vary widely from the view that it's the worst possible thing humanity can do, on through to the view that it's the best possible thing humanity can do (e.g., David Pearce), with a broad spectrum in between. (I don't have an ideal example of the former group in mind, but I could mention Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, who advocates deep ecology and opposes GMOs.) I think we will see sharper divisions between environmentalist vegans (especially advocates of deep ecology) and animal rights/animal welfare vegans over time. I don't know how the population breaks down in the west today, or how many people have even had to think about it that much.
- rboyd 12y ago
  Your last sentence is pretty interesting to me. After months of prodding from my girlfriend to go vegan, the book 'Abundance' and the chapter on the water inefficiency of factory farming is what finally turned me. It was reasonably easy for me to justify carnivorism as naturally occurring, harder to justify water waste with so many humans going thirsty. Without even starting down the emissions road. That said, looking at it now (and especially once synthetic meats come online, out of cost efficiency if nothing else), I think our children might look back on the practice of animal slaughter as being pretty horrifically barbaric.
  - hollerith 12y ago
    >with so many humans going thirsty Where are there humans going thirsty? Honest question.
    - Swizec 12y ago
      In places where they don't have water purification plants. Also in places that are becoming uninhabitable to humans. Think expanding deserts and such.

DiabloD3 12y ago

I'm anti-GMO, anti-dairy, pro-cheese, and pro-beef (so Im not in the vegan crowd at all)... yet I'd at least try this especially if it produced high quality cheeses on par with the best unpasteurized cheeses I've had. Why am I anti-diary? The pasteurization process produces denatured proteins (linked to cancer), contains hormones that are not biologically inert for humans (we are not baby cows), and contain huge amounts of lactose (a sugar that some people are allergic to, and is not a particularly good thing to have in our diets). The production of most hard cheeses and some soft cheeses tends to remove a lot of the hormone and lactose content, as well as some of the denatured proteins. Cheese does not require pasteurized milk, nor does it benefit from it in any way, as cheese was the first viable method for long term storage of milk.

maxerickson 12y ago
Lactose intolerance is not an allergy. (I'm not sure that is what you mean or not though, and some people do indeed have milk allergies.)
- Zancarius 12y ago
  It could go both ways. I can't speak for the OP, but I can say that I've found it's sometimes easier to explain sensitivities as allergies to people who don't understand the differences. So, giving that poster the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume they either don't know the difference themselves, or they DO know but don't want to split hairs on the matter in case someone doesn't know. As a personal anecdote along these lines and since discovering my own sensitivities to canola (and rapeseed oils in general), I've learned that simply calling it a "sensitivity" doesn't always convey the need to avoid certain ingredients. So, sometimes I tell people instead to "think of it as a food allergy," which they usually understand. I think that at least part of the problem is that, to a layperson, sensitivity doesn't sound as urgent or at least is suggestive of "optional avoidance." For some people, chemical sensitivities are anything but optional avoidance...
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Does it even qualify as a sensitivity? The problem is that the body ignores the lactose.

Houshalter 12y ago

A similar idea in the works is using bacteria to produce sugar and other nutrients. One company claims they can make more than 30 times as much sugar per acre as regular agriculture. Some discussion and links on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future_of_food_and_why_cities_wont_need_much/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/31zo1r/a_future...

jqm 12y ago

The article mentions proteins can be produced by yeast, but an additional fat (such as palm oil) will need to be added. Yeasts don't produce fats? Can something else be modified to produce fats identical to milk fat? A plant maybe?

george88b 12y ago
E. coli can be genetically modified to produce fats. Yeast can too. The fat content is just more varied requiring many different yeast clones to be developed for production.

poulsbohemian 12y ago

Amateur cheesemaker here - coincidentally the research side of commercial cheesemaking is already doing very similar things because separating milk into its constituent components is more profitable than actually making cheese. I attended a class about a month ago where the message was that in the future we won't make cheese from milk, but rather we'll start with just those caseins that have been extracted and concentrated. The thinking is that even the water in the milk may have other commercial value apart from just the cheesemaking, or at a minimum can be captured and used in lieu of needing an additional water source. Wish they would have gone a little deeper on the science in the article - they mention chymosin for example, but as far as I know the vast majority of chymosin used in commercial cheese production today is already vegan (at least in the US - Europe not necessarily).

bayesianhorse 12y ago

From the standpoint of animal welfare, I think milk and cheese are some of the least offending products. For about 7000 kilos of milk "only" one cow has to live for a year, and birth one calve. With about a 50% chance of this calve being raised for slaughter. And both cow and calve also yield meat. Compare that to the one chicken per chicken. If you don't want to go vegan, but reduce your animal welfare "footprint", avoid meat from small animals like pigs and poultry.

danuker 12y ago
I stand to disagree. While animal "welfare" can be measured in individuals, we also need to consider the impact on the environment. Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_production#Water_resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... it says that the water consumption per quantity of meat is 3-4 times lower for poultry and pork than for beef. The environment supports many more animals that we do not eat, so resource use is more important than headcount in my opinion. You could count the number of flies that died because of industry, but what would that accomplish?
guygurari 12y ago
This belief is unfortunately misguided; there is much suffering involved in industrial milk production [1]. It begins with the cow being separated from its calf, usually when it is just newly born. The cow generally responds by searching frantically for its lost calf, repeatedly crying out for it until its throat becomes sore. The cow might also become sick and lose weight due to the separation. It continues with the milking process, which is painful and terrifying for the cows, as evidenced by their response. Milk-producing cows have been bred to maximize milk production, which means they have oversized udders that lead to illness. These are just a few examples of many. Generally speaking, cows in the dairy industry lead a short and exceedingly miserable life. If the goal is to minimize suffering without going vegan, I think that wild-caught fish provide the least offending animal-based food. But wild-caught fish are generally bad from an ecological perspective. [1] See for example http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/ http://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/real-talk-milk/ , http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/ http://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/dairy/ , and the documentary films Earthlings and Food Inc. A quick google search will reveal many more sources.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

guard-of-terra 12y ago
Actually they spend a healthy chunk of the article on that topic.

aurora72 12y ago

What about making a human without human? To those who try to outsmart nature: Would they like to be produced without human?